It Was Yellow and Pink[1]:
The Transition to Post-Impressionist Color
in the Early Work of Woolf and O'Keeffe
(unpublished, 1999)
”Light is the positive or masculine force in nature; color is its negative or feminine force”
--Corinne Heline, Healing and Regeneration Through Color (1)
Color is of central importance to both Virginia Woolf and Georgia O'Keeffe. The first words of O'Keeffe's autobiography declare the primacy of color: "The meaning of a word--to me--is not as exact as the meaning of a color. Colors and shapes make a more definite statement than words."[2] For Woolf too, "the first of [her] senses to wake is the colour sense" (L5, 305). Color represents light and life to both artists; Woolf's first memory of "lying in a grape and seeing through a film of semi-transparent yellow" (MOB 66 ), her fascination with the colors of sky and atmosphere is paralleled by dozens of O'Keeffe studies of sunrises and sunsets such as the Texas watercolor series of 1917, Light Coming on the Plains.[3] And for both women, color also was crucially associated with femininity. O’Keeffe’s The Shanty was a deliberate effort to paint “one of those dismal-colored paintings like the men. . . all low-toned and dreary” (O’Keeffe, pl. 33).[4] And Jane Goldman’s new book on The Feminist Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf persuasively argues that Woolf’s “feminist understanding of colour [was] . . . associated with Post-Impressionism” (9).
To what degree is Woolf and O’Keeffe’s interest in color an artifact of their modernism, an absorption of contemporary cultural trends in both art and fashion? And to what degree is it a function of their adoption of the rhetoric of femininity--a socially constructed display of gender identity? For a period near the beginning of both women’s careers modernism, at least in painting, was briefly associated with chromatism. The new colors of Post-Impressionism--the blues and greens of Cezanne, the pinks and greens of Gaugin and Matisse, the bright yellows and roses of Kandinsky--that so scandalized gallery visitors quickly became widespread in the culture. Documenting how much of the revolutionary impact of the First Post-Impressionist Exhibition was a reaction to garish, non-realistic use of color, Goldman notes “the connections made in contemporary reviews of Post-Impressionism between the shocking colours and depiction of women” (111). And so, as both she and Charles Riley note, the association of color and the male avant-garde was fairly short-lived: “Colorism generally flares briefly and then gives way to formalism” (Riley 2). Picasso’s blue and rose periods fade to the browns and greys of Cubism; Fry’s Notes to the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition focus on structure rather than color as the key element of the new art (Goldman 128, 131, 137). Perhaps not coincidentally, the bright pastels abjured by many male artists were quickly picked up by the fashion world and became increasingly associated with femininity. Vogue covers from 1911-1914 have a fairly subdued range of colors.[v] But by 1917, the browns, golds, reds, and blacks, whites, and greys have been replaced by intense salmon oranges juxtaposed to fuchsias, pale pinks, lavenders, and softly muted pea greens.[vi]
The transition made in these magazine covers also appears in the work of Woolf and O'Keeffe, from approximately 1915 to 1923. During this crucial formative period, the two share a common trajectory of exploration in their use of color. Both begin somewhat haphazardly, using color derivatively and rather randomly in their apprentice work. Then around 1915, both go through a brief period of withdrawal from color when they concentrate instead on structure. This bout of discipline is followed, around 1917, by a period of explosive experimentation, marked by the use of particular sets of color combinations, some based on color principles and some an expression of contemporary color fashions.
Like many of their contemporaries who were shocked by the non-mimetic intensity of Post-Impressionist color, both O'Keeffe and Woolf were slow to absorb the new palette. Dowling points out that Woolf did not begin fully to appreciate and understand the revolutionary import of Post-Impressionism until her "lively discussions" with Roger Fry about art and literature in 1916-20 (97). Very few works by Georgia O'Keeffe survive from this apprentice phase to show us her process of assimilation. A small 1914 painting, Horse--Red (reproduced in Eldredge 62), reveals that she has already been influenced by the color theory underlying Impressionism: her bright, primary colors (predominately red, blue, yellow, and a bright apple green) are juxtaposed in swatches of pure pigment. But this painting is highly derivative, looking like a cross between a Seurat and an early Kandinsky with subject matter by Fanz Marc. Displaying none of the subtle gradation and smooth surface characteristic of O’Keeffe’s more mature work, it is roughly similar to Woolf's use of color in The Voyage Out, published the following year: lively and adventurous, appearing in splotches and clumps of sudden brilliance, but as yet more random than structurally significant. Woolf herself described the novel as “a haralinquinade. . . an assortment of patches” (D2 17.)
In 1915, the year The Voyage Out was published, Georgia O'Keeffe looked back on her apprentice work and, recognizing that it was all derivative of other people's ideas, decided “ to start anew" (O’Keeffe, pl. 1). She began to make a series of charcoal drawings, organic abstractions which she called "Specials" which are the first work of her mature vision.[vii] She continued to abjure color from October of 1915 until June of 1916, when she finally felt she "needed blue" (O’Keeffe, pl. 1). [viii]
The period during 1916 when O'Keeffe was practicing her scales in black and white, Woolf was beginning to write Night and Day. The color scheme of Night and Day is largely representational with fairly conventional psychological overtones. Red is the dominant color appearing fifty times and being the most fully articulated not only as “red,” but also “scarlet,” “crimson,” “ruddy,” and “russet.” The next most frequently used colors are green (41 times), blue (39), white (35), and yellow (29) -- the basic primary palette.
The significance of color in the novel is not, however, simply a matter of statistics. Red, for example, appears most often, in part simply because Woolf so often describes people’s complexions and because so many building are made of brick. Much of the meaning of color derives from the context in which colors appear: what other colors they are linked with and opposed to. By far the most common color combination in Night and Day is red and yellow or gold: red and gold books are mentioned twice (15, 19); red and yellow tulips and red and yellow chrysanthemums grace Rodney's apartment (73, 98), and reddish yellow light suffuses the sky and shines out of windows (185, 187). The only other color combination repeated more than twice is the compound grey-blue; sky, clouds and the horizon of London are all described in these terms (60, 72, 162).
These two color complexes, one warm and glowing, the other cool and rather distant, in fact mark out a basic symbolic opposition in the novel, described by Melinda Cumings as “the moonlit world of vision and the sunlit world of facts" (339).[ix] Grey, blue, white, and silver form the moon complex. Red is the color of desire in the novel; paired with yellow, it shows a dynamic trajectory of change. Blue is the color of mental independence, but the way it is paired with grey tends to undercut its vitality. If you follow the colors, the novel becomes the story of a choice between the paling out of color from blue to grey to white and the infusion of color through red.[x] Red and yellow signal the promise or possibility of a connection between Katherine and Ralph, present from the first pages of the novel: Katherine's first impression of Ralph is of "a young man with his face slightly reddened by the wind" (11); when Ralph first meets Katherine she is wearing a "dress of some quiet color, with old yellow-tinted lace for ornament, to which the spark of an ancient jewel gave its one red gleam" (13). However, as long as Katherine and Ralph are attracted to Rodney and Mary, the reds and yellows tend to cluster around the objects of their affection. Katherine is initially associated with a lack of color in an explicit rejection of the post-Impressionist palette. William Rodney says, "She doesn't like apricots, she doesn't like peaches, she doesn't like green peas. She likes the Elgin marbles, and gray days without any sun" (173). In the middle of the novel, when Katherine is an unattainable dream, Ralph imagines her in cool colors, as "some vast snowy owl" (146), and later, the combination of blue sky and gray manor house in the country gives him "the feeling of [Katherine's] presence nearby” (224). However, once the vectors of attraction shift, warm tints begin to recluster around the lovers. For example, the velvet curtains which screen the telephone, described as purple on one page, turn to red on the next when Katherine enters the cubbyhole to speak to Ralph (309, 310). While this account of some of the color references in Night and Day shows that Woolf was deliberately using color as an element of structure, it also demonstrates the degree to which Night and Day was conceived of as a conventional novel: color is simply used to represent the warm and cool moods of emotion; it is never freed from its representational context.
Tired of the conventional labor of Night and Day, Woolf began to write the innovative short stories that would be published in 1921 as Monday or Tuesday, compositions which are directly analogous to the next and simultaneous phase of O'Keeffe's career. In 1916-17, O'Keeffe deliberately broadened her palette with a series of water-color sketches. Many of these were experiments with blending primaries such as the abstract watercolor entitled simply "Red, Blue, and Green" (reproduced in Udall, p. 49).[xi] The short stories Woolf wrote between 1917 and 1922 show similar patterns of experimentation. It is not just that she is using color much more frequently than in Night and Day, she is also using much more abstract, non-mimetic color; her color combinations are now clearly informed by theoretical discussions of color theory, and she is beginning to use color as a kind of formal element, playing with the rhythm and frequencies as if she is composing a form of color-music.
The most obvious example of Woolf's new interest in abstract color is her new near-obsession with the primary triad of red, yellow, and blue. In these eleven short pieces the combination appears no less than eight times. Its six manifestations in "Kew Gardens" establish the triad's significance as a metaphor for the prismatic multiplicity of light, as the red, yellow, and blue colors of the petals are picked up and refracted onto the back of the snail, into a drop of water, and finally suffused throughout the atmosphere (CSF 90, 91, 95). Woolf obviously liked this effect, using it again in "The Evening Party," to describe the "yellow and red panes" of light the ocean liners cast upon the blue ocean (CSF 96) and also in "An Unwritten Novel," where the roofs of Eastborne are "striped red and yellow, with blue-black slating" (CSF 114).
What marks these stories' beginning mastery of a formalist, Post-Impressionist sense of color is not, however, so much Woolf's choice of colors as the way she arranges them. In many of the pieces, color is treated neither as a psychological symbol or a representational referent but as an abstract element of design. The simplest and most obvious example of this is "Solid Objects." If you extract the colors from this story and arrange them in sequence like a series of musical notes, it becomes clear that the colors establish a kind of rhythmic structure which is equivalent to the plot of the story: black, blackness, red, black; green, gold, green; green, blue, green, blue, and crimson; black (CSF 102-7). The only time when colors are combined is the story's turning point when the complex harmonies of blue, green, and crimson on the piece of broken china launch the protagonist's obsession with found objects (CSF 104).
The next phase in Woolf and O’Keeffe’s color development is a full-out adoption of Post-Impressionist color preferences. By 1917-18, O’Keeffe had begun to expand her color range, moving in particular into combinations of pinks with yellows and greens, including a whole series of Pink and Green Mountains (see Udall 34, 63, 65). Many of her first oils employ these new pastel tints (see, for example, Udall 36), incorporating experiments with color music as in the well-known Music--Pink and Blue (O’Keeffe, pl. 14) and Blue and Green Music (Udall 81). In Woolf's writing of the early twenties, Jacob's Room and the last of the short stories collected in Monday or Tuesday, her palette, like O'Keeffe's, expands to include more pinks and purples. New color combinations, in particular, blue and green and yellow and rose signal her absorption of a post-Impressionist color aesthetic.
Although green and blue frequently appear in Woolf's writing in descriptions of sky and landscape or with purple in descriptions of water, the color compound green-blue makes it first appearance in the atmosphere of "Kew Gardens” (CSF 95), shortly before the painterly improvisation of "Blue and Green." In “Kew Gardens,” what is green-blue is the very atmosphere of light emanating from the flower bed, which has repeatedly been presented as red, blue, and yellow (CSF 95). Divorced from specific referents, the hues are pure abstractions of light: an exercise in primaries creating secondaries,
Blue and green were seen by Woolf’s artistic circle as the dominant colors in Cezanne's early work; Fry speaks of the "pale sky blue and celadon green" of his Lazarus, the first painting discussed in Fry’s book on Cezanne (15). As early as 1912, Woolf had made fun of her artist friends’ "furious excitement. . . over their pieces of canvas coloured green and blue" (L215; quoted by Gillespie, 279). But by 1919, these were the colors of her own “wild outbursts of freedom,” as she described “Blue and Green” and “Monday or Tuesday” to Ethyl Smythe (quoted by Rosen, 4). In “Blue and Green,” color is activated as never before; no longer simply adjectival,[xii] it becomes a character in its own right. [xiii] Instead of describing green grass and blue sky, Woolf now chronicles the movements of the green lights of day in a house and of the blue lights of evening in the ocean. Like O’Keeffe’s painting of the same year, Blue and Green Music (Udall 81), pools and shafts of green fall into shadow and are replaced by blue defined by flashes of white and black, ending with a spiritual ascension to a new plane; the “faint blue” of Woolf’s Madonnas’ veils (CSF 142) corresponding to the triangle of clear cobalt in the top right-hand corner of O’Keeffe’s painting.
The color scheme of Jacob's Room is much more adventurous and more explicitly feminine than that of Night and Day or even the short stories. Orange is added to the color categories and Woolf expands the nuances of her color vocabulary to include thirty-two different words for colors, twelve more than she used in Night and Day.[xiv] There is a sudden efflorescence of purples and pinks; the least frequent colors in Night and Day, they move into the mid-range in Jacob’s Room. Woolf's interest in both colors is shown by the proliferation of color words to describe particular tints: “ pink” appears fifteen times, accompanied by seven “roses,” two “raspberries,” one” flamingo,” one “coral pink,” one “primrose” and 2 “strawberry” horses. “Purple” makes fifteen appearances, along with two “ violets,” two “ lilacs,” one “amethyst,” and one “ lavender.” This adoption of newly fashionable tints also shows up in the radically innovative color combinations scattered throughout the novel such as scarlet and coral pink, pink and purple, and purple and orange.
By far the most frequent of these fashionable new color combinations to appear in Jacob’s Room is pink and yellow.[xv] Almost an inversion of blue and green (yellow is the complement to blue and red the complement of green), these colors revise the red/yellow combination of Night and Day to be more explicitly feminine and more characteristically Post-Impressionist. Woolf had used pink and yellow earlier, in a strictly mimetic way. Appearing in a description of the color of paint in a portrait in Night and Day (15, 319), pink and yellow begin to take on red and yellow's more emotional and evocative associations with the warmth and light of civilization in the works of the twenties. In "The Evening Party" the windows of the party house are pink and yellow as are the cakes eaten in the intermission of "The String Quartet" (CSF 96, 139).
In Jacob’s Room, pink and yellow take on an even richer complex of associations, finally evoking a quality of light which seems to illuminate an ideal of human connectedness through time and creates a structural rhythm of meaning throughout the novel. The first, expansive and prospective appearance of the colors is in a Roman ruin, looking over Scarborough at sunset: "The whole city was pink and gold" (JR 17) The next two appearances, also taking place in the early evening, stress more human contexts: pink and yellow ropes of roses link a groups of diners together (75), and the narrator imagines light burning behind pink and yellow blinds down through the centuries as travelers approach London (97). Sunset over the monuments of civilization is again evoked with the vision of the cross atop St. Paul's glowing "rosy gilt (113). The human context is reasserted in a meditation on the evanescence of beauty, as the faces of women passing in the street are described as pink and yellow pictures. Finally yellow and rose move back to the cradle of civilization, Greece, where the houses surrounding Constitution Square in Athens are lemon and rose colored (153), and where, this time at sunrise, light moves over the monuments of civilization, flushing the marble columns of the Parthenon, the Pyramids, St. Peter's and finally, again, St. Paul's (162).
The complexity of structural relationships between these episodes of color is deliberately designed to stretch over both space and time; they expand and contract from societal to individual contexts in a formal rhythm which weaves all of humanity together while echoing the novel's thematic tensions between time past and time present, between the promise of life and its premature end. The sequential pacing of yellow and rose follows the conventional parabola of an elegy: beginning at sunset, passing through evanescence, arriving at sunrise, following the sun in its movement from the east of Greece and Egypt and Rome back to the west of England.
The association of color and femininity is of long standing. The Renaissance opposition between line or form and color, disengo versus colore was picked up by nineteenth century French art critics such as Charles Blanc who predicted the ruin of the pictorial arts if color became too dominant: “painting speeds to its ruin; it will fall through color just as mankind fell through Eve” (quoted by Riley 6). And the tradition continues up to contemporary research in which it is discovered that women make much finer discriminations in color and have much larger color vocabularies than men. As modernists, Woolf and O’Keeffe raided Post-Impressionism for what they found useful. For both it was the freedom to experiment with color liberated from mimetic constraints, manipulated as abstract design but still evocative of human concerns.
Endnotes
[1]. My title is that of a 1959 oil by O’Keeffe, reproduced in Udall, p. 96.
[2]. Georgia O’Keeffe, Georgia O’Keeffe [1]. This volume has no page numbers, only plate numbers. Bracketed page numbers refer to text, counting the first page of text as 1.
[3]. See works from this series in Udall, p. 47 and in Cowart and Hamilton, pl. 16 and 17.
[4]. Ironically, Duncan Phillips purchased this painting, making it O’Keeffe’s first to be held by a national collection (O’Keeffe, pl. 33).
[v]. See the collection of Vogue covers in Packer, especially p. 37.
[vi]. See Packer, especially p. 51.
[vii]. Examples of Specials can be found in Udall, pp. 31-2.
[viii]. Riley notes that “O’Keeffe’s first step into the avant garde was made in black and white” (168), an interesting reminder that she did not begin her professional artistic life as a colorist.
[ix]. This color contrast is also central to To the Lighthouse; see Stewart 444-51.
[x]. Many critics have noted Woolf’s association of lack of color with death, especially in the figure of the eclipse. See Rosen, 19-20 and the entire first section of Goldman’s book.
[xi]. Red, blue, and green form an alternate primary triad occasionally used by Woolf as well as O’Keeffe. See Riley for a discussion of modern battles over primary schemas (3). Other examples of contemporary O’Keeffe compositions based on primary triads are the well-known Evening Star series (O’Keeffe, pl. 7-9). Many more are published for the first time in Udall; see pp. 27, 50, 80.
[xii]. Rosen makes this point (3), although her statement that this is the first time Woolf uses colors “as parts of speech other than adjectives” needs to be verified.
[xiii]. In her Forward to Recent Paintings of Vanessa Bell, Woolf later declared “Color is character” (quoted by Goldman 164).
[xiv]. Statistically, the book is dominated by whiteness, appropriate for an elegy considering Woolf's tendency to associate etiolation with death; there are seventy mentions of that color plus one occurrence of ivory.
[xv]. That these were currently fashionable colors is indicated by a 1922 Vogue cover (Packer 124). Vanessa had worked with lemon and rose in 1919 in her View of the Pond at Charleston (Marsh 105). There is a yellow and pink watercolor of a sunrise by O’Keeffe from 1917, but she did not begin to use this color combination regularly until the later twenties; see for example, Two Calla Lilies on Pink (1928; O’Keeffe, pl 28) and Pink Abstraction (1929; Udall 86).
Works Cited
Cumings, Melinda Feldt. “Night and Day: Virginia Woolf’s Visionary Synthesis of Reality.” Modern Fiction Studies 18 (1972): 339-49.
Dowling, David. Bloomsbury Aesthetics and the Novels of Forster and Woolf. New York: St. Martin's, 1985.
Eldredge, Charles C. Georgia O’Keeffe. The National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution in Association with Harry N. Abrams, 1991.
Fry, Roger. Cezanne: A Study of His Development. 1927; rpt. New York: Noonday P, 1958.
Gillespie, Diane Filby. The Sister’s Arts: The Writing and Painting of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell.
Syracuse UP, 1988.
Goldman, Jane. The Feminist Aesthetics of Virginia Woolf. New York: Cambridge UP, 1998.
Heline, Corinne. Healing and Regeneration Through Color. Seventeenth Edition. Marina del Rey, CA:
DeVoross and Company, 1980.
Marsh, Jan. Bloomsbury Women. New York: Henry Holt, and Co., 1995.
O'Keeffe, Georgia. Georgia O'Keeffe. New York: Viking, 1976.
Packer, William. The Art of Vogue Covers, 1909-1940. New York: Harmony Books, 1980.
Riley, Charles A, II. Color Codes: Modern Theories of Color in Philosophy, Painting and Architecture,
Literature, Music, and Psychology. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1995.
Rosen, Amy. The Pulse of Color: A Study of Virginia Woolf. Ph.D. Dissertation. SUNY Buffalo. DAI Oct.
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Stewart, Jack. “Color in To the Lighthouse.” Twentieth Century Literature 28.1 (Spring 1985): 438-58.
Udall, Sharyn R. O’Keeffe and Texas. The Marion Koogler McNay Art Museum in association with Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1998.
Woolf, Virginia. The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf. Ed. Susan Dick. York: Harcourt, 1985.
---. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. Vol. 2. Ed. Anne Olivier Bell. New York: Harcourt, 1978.
---. Jacob’s Room. 1922. New York: Harcourt, 1960.
---. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. Vol 5 Eds. Nigel Nicolson and Joan Trautman. York: Harcourt, 1980.
---. Moments of Being. 2nd ed. Ed. Jeanne Schulkind. New York: Harcourt, 1985.
---. Night and Day. 1920. New York: Harcourt, 1948.
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